Silence
by PleaseMoveYourSeat
Summary: She had been taken by HYDRA when she was just a child. They turned her into a deadly assassin that could go toe-to-toe with the Winter Soldier. Actually, she was designed to be his partner. He was a battering ram, the frontline assault. She was the stealth aspect of the group, shrouded in total secrecy. If he was a ghost story, then she was the ghost story that ghosts told.
1. Silent

She wasn't like the others.

She had been created before them, captured at a young age, involuntarily. Like the first one.

She was much more rebellious than the others. Which they found inconvenient, but fixable. They took away her ability to speak. Her one freedom in the enslavement she landed herself in. And they named her Silent. A mockery.

They made her a weapon, a deadly assassin that could go toe-to-toe with the Winter Soldier. She was designed to be his partner, actually. They had made him a battering ram, the frontline assault. Silent was his backup. She was the rooftop sniper and stealth aspect of the partnership. Specifically made for the stealthiest missions HYDRA would ever need.

And they made her invisible, a master of camouflage, blending in. No one outside of HYDRA had ever known she existed, she was never seen on security cameras or by witnesses. If the Winter Soldier was a metaphorical ghost story, then she was the ghost story that ghosts told.


	2. Arrogant

"Target sighted. Coming your way, Silent." The quiet voice of Silent's mission partner said over her comm unit. She tapped it once, signaling that she had heard, then raised her gun a little higher. She was crouching on a fire escape about twenty meters off the ground, too high for any security cameras in the area to see her. Plus the area around her was pitch-black and her cloak made her body seem shapeless. No one that was unrelated to HYDRA was allowed to see her. If they did, they died. Zero witnesses, zero chance of being spotted on a camera.

Silent knew that the target was a middle-aged woman with black hair and olive-colored skin. She was roughly, if not a little taller than the assassin herself. But that was the limit to her knowledge of the woman. She knew her job was to take her down. Locate, kill, move on. Ignore the remorse she felt. If she showed emotion, she was severely punished. That's all the incentive she ever needed.

Silent waited another thirty seconds, then tapped a question in morse code. "P-O-S-I-T-I-O-N"

"Quarter mile northwest. Patience, target is approaching. Remember you have one shot at this, she's on foot but several policemen are trailing her." Silent resisted the urge to scoff at the warning. Of course the target had backup. When didn't they? "Eliminate the target, then disappear." She rolled her eyes. What else would she be doing? Shaking hands with the officers, introducing herself as an assassin for an organization that didn't officially exist?

She checked to make sure the silencer on her gun was on securely. No witnesses. Idly, Silent wondered why she and Winter had been called in for this mission. It seemed simple enough.

The voice of her handler came over her comm. "Update, she's wearing a bulletproof vest. You'll need to take her out manually, Asset two. Asset one, snipe the target's backup."

"Yes sir." Winter said. Silent tapped her comm unit, then swung over the side of the railing and rolled when her feet touched the ground. She methodically took off her cloak and most of her guns and threw them beside a pile of boxes, leaving her with several knives, a pistol, and a taser. With a cocky smile on her face she crouched at the edge of the alley and waited. This wouldn't be hard.

"Target is ten meters away." Winter murmured. Then, "five." Silent stood and drew a knife. The woman stepped into view. Silent waited two beats, then tackled the woman from behind.

In mid-fall she twisted, landing on top of Silent. The woman moved almost too fast for her to see as Silent was disarmed. The assassin sighed and stood as the woman did the same, then she spun behind her and kicked the back of her knees. The target's knees buckled and she fell to the ground, Silent drew a knife and pushed her all the way to the pavement and stabbed her in the back of the neck.

It was only thanks to her enhanced senses that Silent saw the bullet traveling towards her skull. She moved in the nick of time, feeling the bullet graze her hair. Silent rolled behind the cover of a building, knelt and drew her gun. A plainclothes policeman was running towards her. He was dead before he fully registered that she had taken cover. She saw another across the street and took him down as well, then another. Sirens wailed in the distance, an explosion went off nearby.

"Get out!" Winter ordered her as he shot down several others. "This was supposed to have minimal casualties!"

The assassin grabbed the weapons she had put down earlier. She climbed the fire escape and was once again enveloped in darkness. But she wasn't leaving. Oh, no, Winter wasn't going to do this alone. She picked up a grenade launcher and waited for the police cars to arrive. They did so in less than two minutes. She fired the grenade launcher twice and the bombs broke through the police car windows, then exploded and left the flaming remains in the center of the road, acting like a barrier.

"Get out, damn it!" Winter repeated. "I'm fine!"

In her annoyance, she failed to notice the policeman that shot blindly into the alleyway, desperately trying to get rid of the invisible threat. The bullet wedged itself in her shoulder and she resisted the urge to scream, instead choosing to stay as still as possible. Her handlers wouldn't be pleased about this.


End file.
